Art in Review

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: December 7, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

Correction Appended

PAUL MCCARTHY'S

Chocolate Factory

Maccarone Gallery

630 Greenwich Street, West Village

Through Dec. 24

The Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy is not a sentimentalist. In performances in the 1990s he turned Santa Claus into a filthy old man, nose running and face bloodied, as he smeared his white-trimmed red costume with food and various fluids. Christmas wasn't a holiday; it was a psychotic episode. The spirit of giving was just a nice term for compulsive acting out.

A decade later Mr. McCarthy, like everyone else in the art world, has appeared to put childish rebelliousness aside, cleaned up his act and gone into business. He used to make a mess; now he's making product, specifically a line of expensive chocolate Santa Clauses for the holiday season under the name Peter Paul Chocolates LLC.

To this end, he has temporarily transformed his gallery, Maccarone, into a factory outlet, which wasn't so easy to do; the plumbing and electrical systems had to be overhauled to meet city codes before kitchen hardware could be brought in. Then, because no one really knew the confectionary ropes, Peter P. Greweling of the Culinary Institute of America was enlisted to supervise the whole affair.

The results are worth the hassle. The figures of Santa carrying a Christmas tree -- 10 inches high and made of top-of-the-line semisweet Guittard chocolate -- are being smoothly turned out in gift wrapping at a rate of 1,000 a day. Cost: $100 a figure, not including a shipping and handling fee. The retail office is open and taking orders on the gallery premises seven days a week. (The work is also available on the Web at peterpaulchocolates.com.) And even if you don't want to buy, you can watch the fully staffed factory, enclosed in glass, in operation.

It's all so great: art as the cottage-industry enterprise everybody wants it to be, turning out a line of cute cash-and-carry luxury objects, consumerist totems for the holiday shopping countdown. Of course none of this would bear the McCarthy stamp unless there were some spoiler element. In this case the tree the Santa carries is modeled on a commercial sex toy. You may not see this at first, but once you do, you keep seeing it.

But that's great art for you: It may give you a sugar high, but it has dirty little secrets. HOLLAND COTTER

KONRAD KLAPHECK

Paintings

Zwirner & Wirth

32 East 69th Street, Manhattan

Through Dec. 22

Any painter knows it's not so much what you paint as how you paint it. For most of his career the German painter Konrad Klapheck, born in 1935, has made images of furniture, machines, plumbing and appliances using a carefully distorted realist technique that he has characterized as a rejection of Tachisme, the European equivalent of Abstract Expressionism.

It is a world of smoothly shaded forms, familiar yet strange, that combine architectural scale with a fleshlike soft glow and intimations of sexual entanglements. Mr. Klapheck's first New York show since his debut at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1969 has 17 paintings and one large drawing dating from 1958 to 1998; they attest to the constancy of his style.

Mr. Klapheck endows consumer goods with the displaced desires that drive consumerism, often by emphasizing the contrast of soft and hard, flexible and rigid, sinuous and straight. In ''The Capitulation'' (1966) some kind of black tubular appliance and its orange ringlet cord are draped over a stolid wood side chair like a spent body. A similar relationship is enacted in ''Amorousness'' (1969) by an old but pale-colored telephone and a tubular chair whose conflicting styles bring to mind the tensions of Germany in the 1920s and '30s.

In other paintings single forms are rendered with a staunch blockiness that can only be called parental. The ominous gray adding machine called ''The Emperor'' of 1966 resembles an armored vehicle, while ''Inquisition'' (1971) gives a sewing machine the forceful snub nose of a diesel engine.

This tendency reaches its apex and calms down a bit in ''Maturity'' (1986), a wonderfully satisfying image of a boxy red adding machine. Its crooked arm and keys suggest a bemedaled marionette on parade, while its too-thin roll of paper hints at a pea-size brain. ROBERTA SMITH

ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN

The Geometry of Seeing

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

533 West 23rd Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 21

Julie Saul Gallery

535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea

Through Jan. 12

If you don't know Elaine Lustig Cohen's name, probably it's because she was never a single-minded careerist. Ms. Lustig Cohen, now 80, had a successful career as a graphic designer before turning to painting in the mid-1960s. Her first solo gallery show was in 1970, and in 1979 she was the first woman to have a one-person exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery. From 1972 to 1998 she operated the Upper East Side bookstore and gallery Ex Libris.

This two-gallery retrospective of works dating from 1965 to the present reveals a history of restless, playful variation founded on a finely tuned formalist sensibility. It includes geometric school-of-Mondrian paintings and lively Cubist compositions of jumbled triangular and rhomboid shapes. Functional wooden boxes have exterior surfaces covered by bands and blocks of color, and a sewing kit she designed could be mistaken for the work of a Jazz Age Art Deco master.

Correction: December 11, 2007, Tuesday
A brief art review in Weekend on Friday about paintings by Konrad Klapheck, at the Zwirner & Wirth gallery on East 69th Street, misstated the history of his shows in New York. He had one at the Edward Thorp Gallery in 1993; the Zwirner & Wirth show is not his first in New York since his debut at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1969.